However, TV programs, and even more so, movies, require investment. If a TV program or a movie is sufficiently successful, the investment may be recouped with a generous profit. But look around! There has never been a TV film or a movie showing, for example, China’s annihilation of the United States, including its entire population, as is described (with pride!) by a Chinese (under the assumed name of the Minister of Defense of China) in his article, published in “The Epoch Times” that an infinitesimal percentage of the U.S. population reads.

I have encountered a fierce reluctance from U.S. business to invest in anything that might offend or antagonize the dictators of China. Why is this tremulous love of U.S. business (or Western business in general) for the dictators of China? Not a single television or movie expose on the mortal danger of China! On April 8, 2006, the New York Times editorial said that in 2004 the wages in China “have climbed about 25 percent over the last three years in Shenzhen, Beijing and Shanghai.” Three cheers! But what were they in 2004—and in 2006 outside these three cities? They “averaged $58 to $74 a month.”

Then the NYT editorial outlines the resulting way of life and work. The outline could have begun with this sentence: “Even the workers of Stalin’s Russia seventy years ago did not know such destitution outside concentration camps.” But the New York Times correspondent in Stalin’s Russia, Walter Duranty, reported the prosperity of Stalin’s Russia and eulogized Stalin. Then, before WW2 and after it the fashion changed, and the attitude to Stalin’s Russia reversed, Duranty (once the world’s best known Western correspondent in Soviet Russia) became an outcast who would have died of hunger, had not the New York Times secretly helped him financially. Today China is as benign in the U.S. media as was Stalin’s Russia when Duranty reigned supreme in the New York Times (or as was Nazi Germany when the British prime minister persuaded Hitler to sign a treaty, establishing “peace in our time”). As I am writing this, the radio station of the New York Times keeps repeating a commercial, persuading its readers to join its trip to China and describing the trip as it might a vacation at the most fashionable resort.

Accordingly, rather than saying that even the workers of Stalin’s Russia seventy years ago did not know such destitution (unless they were in concentration camps), the New York Times editorial says: “These jobs are no picnic.” Formally, the statement is negative, but its style is quite cheerful, if not jocose.

These jobs are no picnic. The women and men put in 10 hours a day, six days a week, churning out one garment after another. Much of the time, they have to move far from their families to get work. To make ends meet, most live with five or six others in rooms that have no electricity or running water. Sometimes it’s a fight just to get paid. Factory owners and managers in poor countries sometimes delay salaries through incompetence. Such delays are particularly painful because the workers are often paid only once a month.

Recent statistics: 400 million Chinese live on $2 a day per family. It will be recalled that despite poverty, the Chinese craftsmanship (such as porcelains and silks) was far superior to its European counterpart for centuries. That is, China can replace the U.S. work force by goods so much cheaper than the corresponding Western goods that a U.S. businessman can buy or produce them in China and sell them in the USA at lower prices than the goods manufactured by U.S. workers and at the same time gets a fabulous profit.

As for those 400 million Chinese, their plight has notable exceptions. All conditions are provided for the promotion of a Chinese if he is a genius of science and technology in the development of post-nuclear super weapons. He will be as rich as TV hosts or even top entertainers in the USA. An Australian inventor developing a super weapon said that the Chinese offered him $100 million a year if he had settled in China. In this way, while the USA attracts top entertainers of all nations, the China dictatorship attracts scientists and technologists of genius of all nations, including Chinese.

In 2004, Ethan Gutmann published a book about American business in China, “Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal.”

What “New China” Gutmann meant? He went to China in the late 1990s. Just as Communists believed that Stalin or Mao is a superb human being because he is a Communist, so too Gutmann believed that free enterprise (he did not know that it had been introduced by Mao) would create the New China.

Never before in history has the business of the West operated in a foreign country under a foreign dictatorship, and inevitably, some Western corporations sold to the dictatorship Western secret military data, for who could expose them? Certainly not Chinese who, including their “new businessmen,” were the slaves or cattle of the dictatorship.

One example of private enterprise from the history of Russia. In 1921, Lenin permitted free enterprise, and businessmen became part of Lenin’s socialism or communism or whatever you may call it. At the close of the 1920s and in the early 1930s, Stalin “liquidated” Lenin’s businessmen.

Yes, the Chinese “new businessmen” fear their masters like cattle their ruthless owners. On the other hand, the U.S. businessmen have to fear only authors like Gutmann, whose book about “betrayal” of U.S. corporations in China was duly read and forgotten.

Something else scares me about Sino-U.S. business. Of course, it is tremendously profitable to the U.S. business. Hence U.S. business in general is against anything that can offend or antagonize the dictators of China. By “betrayal” Gutmann meant the give-away by some U.S. corporations of Western secret military data to the dictatorship in exchange for all kinds of commercial favors. But this is a trifle compared with the maintenance of ignorance among “us the people” concerning the China dictators’ development of post-nuclear super weapons, able to annihilate the United States (or the entire West), including their means of retaliation on which Mutual Assured Destruction and hence peace between nuclear powers have rested.

This “betrayal,” to use Gutmann’s word, cannot be criminally prosecuted as can the “betrayal” that he describes in his book. But this betrayal is fatal to the West as a whole. No, not some secret military data, but the entire civilization is betrayed for the sake of an extraordinary rate of profit as a result of an incredibly low pay of the 400 million Chinese, in combination with the long traditions of craftsmanship in China.